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Cazekiel writes "Sticking a mug in your freezer to ensure a cold beer may be made obsolete, if the Japanese brewing giant Kirin has anything to do about it. How? Kirin came up with a way to create frozen beer foam, dispensed the way you would a soft-serve ice cream cone. Gizmag gives us the details: 'To make the topping, regular Ichiban beer is frozen to -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) while air is continuously blown into it. It's kind of like when a child makes bubbles in their drink, except inside a blast freezer. Once the topping is placed onto regular, unfrozen beer though, it acts as an insulating lid and keeps the drink cold for 30 minutes.'"
Might make flavorless rice lagers easier to go down, but what about real beer? A hefeweizen under an ice cap on a warm summer afternoon? How about an entire glass full of frozen chocolate stout?

They would be like whiskey rocks, I assume. They're rocks (or sometimes metal cubes) that you freeze and drop into drinks you don't want diluted.

Whiskey isn't carbonated, so this would likely result in an explosion of foam. If the metal ones were smooth enough it might not, but that also might hamper their effectiveness. Also, the stone ones (like the ones I have) are usually a soft stone like soapstone, that wont damage the glass when dropped in. I guess the metal ones would have rounded edges.

But the real answer is for people to step up from pisswater beers that don't need to be right at freezing to be drinkable.:)

There are good US beers, but you can't escape the fact that the majority of US beer drinkers prefer the wispy nothingness of Coors/Bud. I once stocked the fridge with a cornucopia of great choices from smaller brewers. Later, multiple guests poked around and asked if there was any Coors:-P

Same experience here. A few summers ago we hosted a party for about 40-50 people, mostly 20-45 year olds from work. I stocked the liquor cabinet and devoted the whole fridge to a great variety of different beers. It was only in the mid-80s, but at the end of the day very little of the beer in the inside refrigerator had been drank (mostly by my brother in law and myself). The garage fridge I keep stocked with Bud Light and some wheat beer for drinking while working in the yard and garden was nearly empt

Why is there this dick waving contest to make ever stronger beers? If you really need to get your drink on, have another beer, have some wine, or liquor. There's nothing wrong with a beer just because there's a different one with a higher alcohol content.

Speak for yourself. I like hoppy beers (well, I like all beers). I like the feeling of not knowing if I just had a sip of beer or I just bit into a grapefruit rind.
And no. No sarcasm was intended here.

Not everyone drinks British beer. Actually, almost no one but the British do, except on a dare, Guinness excepted from the exception.

And watering down beer definitely ruins it.

No argument, except for some American beers where watering them to the point that you cannot taste them is preferable to being able to taste them (my hometown Iron City, frex). This is not limited to American beer, just that I know them better.

And to be fair, they mostly only drink Chang ("Elephant brand" beer) this way. I played on an ice hockey team with a bunch of Thai dudes in Bangkok for a few months, and Chang beer with ice was their drink of choice after practice... the other stuff was usually shotgunned straight out of the can;)

Isn't the whole point that the ice is made of beer, so it doesn't water it down? The problem I see is having to buy the same type of beer ice as the beer you.

Why not just use those rock cubes that you can get for whisky that you stick in the freezer? You might need a bigger glass so that you don't displace the beer. And they'd need to be smooth enough that ey don't flatten the beer by nucleating too many bubbles too quickly.

The problem with that is that the stones (Soapstone) only are really good at lightly chilling small amounts of liquid. Your Scotch/Whiskey will not be ice cold, just chilled, and only if you pour it in small quantities.

I bought my stones with that idea in mind, but it just doesn't work out. They are fantastic for what they were designed for though.

I used the one on Homebrew Chef (halved the recipe... what would I do with 10 gallons of 120m other than eventually get arrested?), substituted my wife's hops for the Amarillo.... also I own the cheapest oxygenation kit I could find.

www.homebrewchef.com/120minuteIPArecipe.html

I think it is going to be awesome. Warning this recipe is a commitment, and by far the most advanced I have yet attempted. There are some nice (and easier!) 90 minute clones out there as well. Also over at Hopville there is a nice a

I would consider Kirin to be real beer. They do also make a Happoshu [wikipedia.org] but the actual beer they make isn't bad. Beer is a very diverse drink and there are many kinds and types. I wouldn't ever consider one type to be more 'real' than others. Regardless it would still be interesting to try this technique for frozen beer foam on all of the different types of beers.

First they came for the American lager
And I didn't speak out because I don't like Bud Light
Then they came for the mass-produced European lagers
And I didn't speak out because I don't have the money to blow on fancy schmancy imports.
Then they came for the stouts.
And I didn't speak up. Do I look Irish to you?
Then they came for the IPA's.
And it was about damn time. I like hops but I don't like to rub them in my eyeballs while I'm drinking beer.
But then they came for the Kolsch.
And there was no one left to speak out for me.

The only beer that merits consumption at anything close to "cold" are the thin, watery excuses produced by the Big 3 breweries in the USA (Larry, Moe and Curly, AKA Miller, Bud and Coors) Real beer needs to be chilled nicely but served in the 45-55 degree range for the flavors to be enjoyed.

I'm sick of this high-temperature snobbery. The number of times I've heard people at bars go tut-tut at a bar because their favorite microbrew's been too cold? Give me a break. What you say may be true of a fine Bavarian Paulaner, but in the USA, most of the microbrews and not just Larry, Moe, and Curly need some serious cooling down due to a number of flavors that they' amateurishly been unable to suppress.

The only beer that merits consumption at anything close to "cold" are the thin, watery excuses produced by the Big 3 breweries in the USA (Larry, Moe and Curly, AKA Miller, Bud and Coors) Real beer needs to be chilled nicely but served in the 45-55 degree range for the flavors to be enjoyed.

This is mostly true. There is actually a Guinness extra cold that is meant to be served cold. They even have special taps that serve it through a super cooler at 3.5C. So I would say that unless a beer is brewed to be enjoyed cold it probably is best served at the 45-55 range as stated.

Miller and Coors (as we think of it in the USA) merged in 2008, making them effectively one brewery in the USA. "Bud" isn't even a brewer, but a brand within AB-InBev, which is about as American as moules-frites. I suppose I'll give you half-credit for that one.

Well when I crossed to pond and visted the Guiness Storehouse (a vast marketing ploy, very little actual brewing) at the Sky Bar they served Guinees "Extra Cold" served at 33 degrees F (curious why they used F).

Guiness Extra Cold is not the same as the traditional Guiness Stout. I was just there in February and during my fun little "Pour your own Pint" Moment", storing the Stout at 38 degrees F and pouring at 44 degrees F was the recommendation.

Guiness and Boddingtons would be the perfect beer for this. Something rich and thick. Forget the lagers.

Last I had it, Boddington's was a lager, and by no means could be called rich and thick. Except for the odour, which is rich - it smells like a ripe urinal, but doesn't taste half bad as far as commercial beer goes.

Anyhow, I think it's all around a bad idea. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. You can't buy mustard and pickle milk shake either, and that's not because people don't love mustard or pickles.

"I didn't know gazpacho soup was meant to be served cold. I called over the chef and I told him to take it away and bring it back hot. He did! The looks on their faces still haunt me today! I thought they were laughing at the chef, when all the time they were laughing at me as I ate my piping hot gazpacho soup! I never ate at the captain's table again. That was the end of my career."

Not all real beers with flavor are particularly bitter... they're just not watered-down-just-a-hint-of-piss U.S. Macrobrews.

Also lots of adults enjoy a bitter flavor -- I say adults just because this is usually a taste that develops later. If it was just about getting shit faced vodka does the job much more efficiently. Nope, I likes my bitter beers because I likes my bitter beers.

Might make flavorless rice lagers easier to go down, but what about real beer?

Considering how this is a pretty neat idea that is not only a pretty big step beyond just ice-cubes made of beer both texturally (frozen foam), and thermodynamically, I'm not sure why the author felt it would be necessary to even remotely knock it in such a retarded manner when...

I'm not sure if OP has ever tried such a beer, but it's pretty flavorful compared to the 5 variants of piss I just listed. And considering how well the Japanese rice beers actually pair with sushi (which is probably where 99% of that exposure will occur in the states), I'd say it's pretty well suited to its purpose.

Then again, it's also fair to say that the domestic Top5 is pretty well suited to their purpose, given that they all pair pretty well with ping-pong balls.

No it won't be coming to an ice cream shop near you because no one will eat it here in the US. Had a chance to try it a couple months ago and it's horrid. Even worse than the flavorless rice lagers that generally come out of that area of the world (and the flavorless ones from the US too).

But their sister product, Miller Lite, has "more taste." What they don't tell you is that more crappy taste is not necessarily better than less crappy taste. The "more taste" marketing campaign never once said it had a BETTER taste than Bud Light, just that it had more. I've smelled some dog turds that probably have a ton of taste, but I'm not going to mess with those, either. I'll stick to Yuengling or Gennesee when I'm feeling poor, and keep sampling quality craft brews the rest of the time.

This reminds me of a time we were in the field and our beer got unappetizingly warm. Due to the kind of work we were doing, we had plenty of liquid nitrogen but insufficient refrigerator space for our liquid refreshments. One evening a member of the team decided he wanted a very cold Guinness and so poured about 250 ml of liquid nitrogen into his glass of beer.

Of course the nitrogen changed state but the surprise (to us anyway) was that the gas caused the beer to freeze sightly slower that it foamed. Within a few seconds, there was a meter or so of frozen beer foam standing up out of the glass. It was completely undrinkable (being in solid form), but wasn't bad if eaten with a spoon; which had to happen quickly as it started to melt immediately.

Moral: Don't send a bunch of twenty-something researchers into the desert for weeks on end without proper cooling equipment.

What this really is, is beer for people who don't like beer. I am a beer enthusiast (not quite a beer snob... yet), and I can tell you that the last thing real beer lovers want is ultra-cold, crapified beer. Don't we have enough beer for people who don't actually like beer? Like all American-style macrobrewed lagers (Bud, Bud Lite, Miller Lite, Coors, and most everything made by Anheuser or Miller-Coors), most Canadian beers (including most all of them exported to the US), Corona, most malt liquors, etc.

Most cheap, common beers are pretty crappy examples of their respective styles. They are generally watery, taste more of adjuncts than hops or barley malt, 4.2%-5.9% alcohol, piss yellow, over carbonated, and meant to be served so cold as to mask what little flavor there is. I'll pass on this frozen beer BS, though I bet plenty of idiots who swear by Bud Light will be all over it.

Does it count as brains when one joins a club that trades a few years of vile and dehumanizing cruelty and debauchery for a lifetime of well paid sinecures coopted through the connivance of fraternity brothers?

Who is getting the vile cruelty inflicted on whom? And for how long?

Also, the debauchery sounds interesting, unless you are thinking of something different from what I am.